Both past and present history teaching has aimed not only to teach students about the past but also to encourage critical thinking and foster good morals. Especially after the Second World War, international and national guidelines emphasized the importance of history teaching to promote peace, critical thinking and human rights. In our modern information era, filled with conflicts and violations of human rights, history teaching has been put forward as a way to teach students appropriate skills of critical thinking and as a way to safeguard democratic values.

In this study of human rights education in Sweden and the US, funded by the Wallenberg foundation, digital tools are used to process and elucidate how history can be used, understood and written in different countries and school cultures.
This project aims to map and clarify how history is construed through practices designed to promote historical thinking and empathy. Theories and intentions are problematized in relation to what is possible in the complex reality of history education.

The Spatial History Project at Stanford University, a part of the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, is made possible by the generous funding of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE), DoResearch, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and The Wallenberg Foundation Media Places Initiative.